Bullies Have High Self-Esteem

There are certain advantages to reading a book which lays out the "big picture" over magazine or journal articles that of necessity are generally limited in scope. Case in point are a couple of articles on violence that I've come across in the past two days, as compared to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature that provides an analysis of violence, and its motivators, across many different fields of study. 

The first article is what prompted the title of this post. CBS News reports:

Bullying behaviors are linked to higher self-esteem, social status, and a lower rate of depression, according to a new provocative study. 

Researchers at Simon Fraser University observed a group of high school students finding that bullies had the highest self esteem, greatest social status, and were less likely to be depressed, as reported by National Post. 

“Humans tend to try to establish a rank hierarchy,” Jennifer Wong, a criminology professor who led the study, told the Post. “When you’re in high school, it’s a very limited arena in which you can establish your rank, and climbing the social ladder to be on top is one of the main ways … Bullying is a tool you can use to get there.” 

Wong notes that many anti-bullying initiatives try to change the behavior of bullies, but often don’t work. This is likely because behavior is hard-wired and not learned, she says. Experts suggest that schools might expand competitive, supervised activities as an alternative outlet to channel dominating behavior.

(As a side note, I would point out that the cure for bullying--"competitive, supervised activities," i.e., sports--have generally been gutted because of enforcement of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which has been held to require that equal sports opportunities be given to girls as to boys, which has resulted in the reduction of sports programs for boys).

This confirms certain of the conclusions in Pinker's work, wherein he wrote that dominance is also related to mating success, and can lead to aggression. He also noted that dominance is related to self-esteem, reporting that psychopaths, street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, serial rapists, and other violent criminals generally score extraordinarily high self-esteem, even narcissim. In other words, "[v]iolence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned."

The second article is from Aeon magazine. It first sets out to repudiate two historically popular theories on why people can become violent:

At present, there are two dominant approaches to understanding violence. Both fall short. The first is what I’ll call the disinhibition theory. Maybe, the story goes, even ordinary people have violent impulses that are usually held in check. When their moral sense breaks down or is somehow blocked, they give in to their dark side. Picture the man who knows that beating his wife is wrong but who, after a long day at work, loses his temper and takes it out on her. Is he our typical culprit?

In 2007, the psychologist C Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky and colleagues published the results of an ingenious experiment to test this idea. First, they drained their test subjects of self-control. They wore down college students by making them resist a tempting dessert or avert their eyes from part of a computer screen. And? The students became more aggressive in their subsequent judgments and behaviours. For example, they were more likely to deliberately blast loud noise into the earphones of another person.

So far, so promising for the disinhibition theory. Yet the experiments detected a pattern in these aggressive tendencies: they arose only in response to a previous provocation. In the sound-blasting experiment, the aggression was directed towards a person whom the participant believed had given them an unfair review on a previous task. When no provocation was present, there was no statistical difference in conduct between participants who had been depleted and those who had not. In other words, the aggression wasn’t a random overflow. On the contrary, it looked like the test subjects were trying to get even.

Now, such experiments might well indicate that some violence is enabled by loss of self-control. But the disinhibition theory sidesteps the question of why we are motivated to be violent in the first place. The impulse has to come from somewhere, and the theory is silent about where that might be.

It might be worth pausing to ask ourselves what kind of answer we expect to find here. Does our propensity for aggression simply come down to a mishmash of various provocations and triggers? Or is there some universal, underlying pattern, a single key that captures the majority of violence in every culture throughout history? The latter option sounds like an ambitious goal for a sociological theory. But the second general approach to violence, which I’ll call the rational theory, is certainly ambitious.

On this view, violence is just a way to achieve instrumental goals. For example, killing rival heirs is sometimes a good idea if you want to be king. Whether it’s fighting among brothers or between nations, these rational-choice models predict that the likelihood of violence increases when its benefits go up or its costs go down.

The theory can boast some empirical successes. Richard Felson, Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University, found that the likelihood of fighting among siblings goes up when parents are present, because younger siblings are more likely to fight when they know their parents might intervene, thus reducing the potential costs to themselves. At the level of states, Vincenzo Bove, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK, and colleagues recently found that foreign nations are much more likely to intervene in a civil war when the country at war with itself also has valuable oil reserves.

But once again, we find ourselves with a puzzle. People frequently resort to violence when, by any measure of practical utility, non-violent means would be more effective. As Baumeister and colleagues noted in the paper ‘Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression’ (1996):

Wars harm both sides, most crimes yield little financial gain, terrorism and assassination almost never bring about the desired political changes, most rapes fail to bring sexual pleasure, torture rarely elicits accurate or useful information…

In 2007, the anthropologists Jeremy Ginges at the New School for Social Research in New York and Scott Atran of the French National Centre for Scientific Research surveyed Israelis and Palestinians on the subject of the Middle East conflict. During these interviews, the researchers presented their participants with a series of hypothetical peace deals; some deals included material incentives for giving up disputed land. A peculiar inconsistency emerged. A subset of the respondents saw the disputed land as just another resource: they were therefore willing to trade it for financial compensation and sign the peace deal, just as the rational model predicted.

Other participants, however, saw the land as sacred, tied to their communal identity. For these participants, adding financial compensation reduced support for the deal. They showed elevated levels of anger and disgust, as well as increased enthusiasm for violence. The rational model cannot handle this kind of data. Adding material incentives should never make the deal worse, unless the relevant utilities that people care about are non-material in nature.

The author's conclusion is that people are violent because their morality demands it. From the article:

For me, the burning question was always about why people disagree about when and whether violence is called for. Why was beating children for disobedience more acceptable 50 years ago than today, and why is it more acceptable in the American south than in the American north? Why do Westerners respond with horror to the killing of women for sexual infidelity, while other parts of the world not only condone but encourage the practice?

To understand how attitudes could be so vastly different across cultures, I started working with the anthropologist Alan Fiske at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Together, we analysed violent practices across cultures and history. We examined records of war, torture, genocide, honour killing, animal and human sacrifice, homicide, suicide, intimate-partner violence, rape, corporal punishment, execution, trial by combat, police brutality, hazing, castration, duelling, feuding, contact sports, and the violence immortalised by gods and heroes, and more. We combed through first-person accounts, ethnographic observations, historical analyses, demographic data, and experimental investigations of violence.

The work was, frankly, depressing. No one wants to read about all the terrible atrocities that people commit. But it was also fruitful. We did in fact find a pattern in all the violence. There was a unifying theme, with all the predictive and explanatory power one could wish for.

Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.

 Of course, this result is also inconclusive. For instance, it doesn't explain the mugger (which falls within the purview of the rational model) or the opportunistic rapist (which may be in the rational model and/or the uninhibited model). Moreover, it doesn't seem to explain the actions of sociopaths, which seem to act without reference to cultural mores.

While I had some criticisms of Pinker's work, overall it seems to do a better job of explaining violence by realizing that there are many different forces and drivers both encouraging and discouraging violence in a person or society, than trying to find a single motivating factor.